How to write your own website content
Writing the content is the part that holds up nearly every website build, including mine. People sit down to write about their business, produce three paragraphs about quality and reliability, and stall.
The trick is to stop trying to write and start answering questions instead. You already answer them on the phone every week.
Start by writing down what you get asked
Over a week, note every question a customer asks you. What do you charge. How soon can you come. Do you cover my village. Do you do small jobs. Are you insured. Can you work around my tenants.
That list is your website. Each of those questions is a heading, and your usual answer is the paragraph under it. It is the fastest content anybody ever writes because you are not inventing it.
It also matches how people search, because the questions they ask you are the questions they type.
Write the way you speak to a customer
Read what you have written out loud. If it is not how you would say it standing in somebody's kitchen, change it. Bespoke solutions tailored to your requirements is not something anybody has ever said aloud.
Say we and you. Say the job, not the service offering. Short sentences. Write as if explaining it to somebody sensible who does not know your trade.
The most persuasive thing a trade website can sound like is a competent person talking plainly, because that is what the customer is trying to find out.
What goes on each page
Home: what you do, where you do it, and how to reach you, in the first few lines. Then the services, the proof and one clear invitation to get in touch.
Each service page: what the job involves, what it typically costs or what decides the cost, how long it takes, what you need from the customer, and one or two examples.
About: who you are, how long you have been doing this, and why you are worth trusting. A photograph of you helps far more than people expect.
Contact: every route you actually answer, the areas you cover, and how quickly you reply.
The things to cut
Welcome to our website. Everybody knows where they are.
We pride ourselves on quality and customer service. Every competitor says it, so it distinguishes nobody.
Long histories of the business, unless the history is the selling point.
Mission statements. No customer has ever chosen a tradesman on one.
Anything you cannot support. Leading, premier, number one: if it is not demonstrable, it makes the rest of the page less believable.
How much to write
Enough to answer the question and no more. A service page of three or four hundred honest words beats twelve hundred padded ones, for readers and for Google alike.
Length only helps when the extra words carry extra information. Repeating yourself at greater length is the oldest SEO habit and it has not worked for a long time.
When you are stuck
Record yourself explaining the job to somebody on the phone and type up what you said. Almost everybody speaks better content than they write.
Or write it as an email to one real customer who asked. Then take the greeting off. That is your page.
Common questions
- How long should each page be?
- Long enough to answer the question properly, usually three to six hundred words for a service page. Padding does not help ranking and it loses readers who were nearly ready to ring you.
- Should I use AI to write my website?
- It will produce something grammatical and generic, which is the exact problem most small business sites already have. It is genuinely useful for tidying up your own words or getting past a blank page, less so for producing the content itself, because the value is in the specifics only you know.
- Do I need to repeat my town name everywhere?
- No. Say it naturally where it belongs: the page title, a heading, the opening line and the contact details. Repeating it into every paragraph reads badly and stopped helping years ago.
- What if I am a terrible writer?
- Then speak it. Record yourself explaining a job and type up what you said, or write it as an email to a customer. Both produce better content than trying to write in a formal voice you do not have.
- Who writes the content if you build my site?
- You supply the facts and I write and structure it, or you write it and I edit. Either works. What does not work is waiting for perfect text, which is why most website builds stall.
If you would rather somebody just did it
I build websites for self-employed tradesmen and small businesses across the UK: £249 to build, then £49.99 a month to host, maintain and update it. The sites I have built currently hold 97 page-one Google rankings between them.